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Latin American Indigenous Studies, Languages and Literature: Beginning Your Research

An introductory guide to doing research on Latin American Indigenous authors, languages, and literature

Beginning Your Research

A first step to searching for materials on your topic is to talk to experts who can suggest beginning sources to you: your professors and anyone else that they recommend.

There are three useful principals to remember and apply when searching any kind of electronic search tool (a library catalog, a digital library, a database, the internet, etc.)

1. A keyword search in any resource will point you to great initial resources, but you will not find all of the resources you need this way. 

2. It is really important that you follow up on your initial searching by:

a) looking at the complete records to identify subject headings or descriptors that you can use to search further

b) carrying out seed research: go to the initial sources and check the footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies to find further resources.  It is also helpful to walk around the shelves in the library where you find initial print sources, as other related sources will be shelved in this area.

3. Use reference sources to start your research as well.  Some strong reference sources for Latin American research include:

Particular Strategies for Content Related to Indigenous Languages and Literatures

Content and Material produced by indigenous authors and in indigenous languages are more obscure and therefore harder to identify and locate than materials published in more commonly known foreign languages.

Because of this, known authors, particular titles, or key reference works are very helpful.  For example, searching the internet (i.e. doing a google search) and even reading a wikipedia page or author's website can be really helpful in identifying a given author's background (where they are from, what languages they speak, what genres of literature they have produced), and creating a list of titles. 

The following anthologies are also very useful:

Tools and Strategies for Effective Keyword Searching

Before reviewing the resources indicated below and on following pages in which to search for research materials, it is helpful to know how to do effective keyword searching.

In addition to those outlined in the box below, additional tools and strategies to do more sophisticated searching include the following:

Boolean operators should be in ALL CAPS

"Quotation Marks" allow you to search for an exact phrase: "mental health"

(Parentheses) allow you to create complex search strings with various clauses within parentheses:

(trauma OR distress) AND (migrants or Refugees) AND Mexico

 

Search Strategies

Try one or two of the following strategies in the database you want to use.  Not all of them are available in every database. Different strategies will change your results and help you target the articles you need.

  Boolean Operators   

Truncation is a search technique that broadens your search to include various word endings. To truncate your search terms, replace the word ending with an asterik *.

infographic that shows the truncated politic* will return results for politics, politician, and political

 

Limits provide database-specific recommendations for narrowing a search. Applying limits will filter out results that don’t meet your search requirements. This will save you time because you won’t need to look through pages of search results that don’t include the information that you need Each database offers different limits. Be sure to check them out to see how they can help you with your search.

For example: In the database, Historical Abstracts, you can filter your search results for peer review, publication date, document type, language, subject, etc.

The image below illustrates how applying limits will help you to narrow
your search results.

nested circles that show how applying limits will reduce the number of results. The largest circle shows 8,747 results of a search on the Enlightenment. A smaller circle within that shows 256 results for a search on the Enlightenment and the Catholic Church. The smallest inner circle shows that search limited to peer reviewed articles, with 230 results

 

It's important to know that databases use subject headings to organize their articles. When you know the right subject headings for your topic, you can search more efficiently. Starting out on a new topic, you won't know the subject terminology. A simple way to find them is to start with a keyword search. When you find an article title that meets your needs, look for the subject headings assigned to that article. In most cases, those subject headings are hyperlinked and will take you to a list of articles with the same subject heading.

screenshot of an article page with an arrow pointing to the Subject Terms. You'll find a list of subject headings or subject terms in each record. The subject headings, or subject terms, are hyperlinked and will send you to a list of records with that subject heading

screenshot of an article's abstract with several keywords highlighted. The abstract is a brief summary of the article that can help you determine is you want to read the full text. Use the abstract to help modify your search by skimming it for additional keywords

Scholarly articles often have extensive bibliographies, also called reference lists or works cited pages. Bibliographies include references to articles, books, and other relevant literature that were published before the article. Some databases provide links to the cited references so that you can look at those articles as well, which might provide more articles for you to use in your paper.

Cited References can help you find articles that are older than the one you are reading.

An Examplle:

infographic of a 2003 article, articles in its bibliography from 1998, 2000, and 2002, plus Times Cited articles from 2006, 2009, and 2011 that have the 2003 article in their bibliography

Look at the example to the left. If you found a relevant article from 2003, you could look at the articles in the bibliography to see where your article got the information used to support their main points. These older articles can also be useful to your research, especially if you need to write a literature review.

You can use a similar method to find newer articles, by looking at the articles who have cited your 2003 article in their bibliographies. To find out more about this method, see the tab for Times Cited references.

 

 

Some databases, like Web of Science, include times cited references. Think of these as the opposite of a bibliography. Where bibliographies include references that are older than the article, times cited references are newer than the article.

Times Cited references can help you find articles that are more recent than the one you are reading.

An Examplle:

infographic of a 2003 article, articles in its bibliography from 1998, 2000, and 2002, plus Times Cited articles from 2006, 2009, and 2011 that have the 2003 article in their bibliography

Look at the example to the left. Let’s say your professor doesn’t let you include references in your paper that are older than 2005. You are finding articles about your topic, but they are all too old. Even the best article about your topic was published in 2003.

Using times cited references, you could see which articles have cited the 2003 article. Chances are you will find one published a more recently that you could use for your paper.

 

 

When you find an article that you think will be a good to use, you can take advantage of “related articles” to find similar articles. Databases have different formulas for determining how an article is “related,” but it usually is a combination of same keywords and descriptors.

You can usually find a list of related articles on the results screen of the database.

infographic of a great article connected to related articles

Specific Search Strings to find Indigenous Literature

Search 1 (note that Maya* will include Maya OR Mayan; and that another language may be subsituted -- Nahua*, Zapotec*, Mixtec*, Etc.):

Any Field: Maya* 

AND

Any Field: language OR literature

 

Search 2 (For languages written in a glyphic form):

Any Field: Maya*

AND

Any Field: pictorial OR codex OR codice

 

Search 3 Subject headings found through the searches above indicate:

Subject: Maya* language

OR

Subject: Maya* literature

 

Online Reference Packages

Additional Subject Specific and Interdisciplinary Reference Sources and Starting Points

The Handbook of Latin American Studies: Annual Serial containing curated lists of seminal literature organized by theme.  The Handbook has been published by the Library of Congress since 1936, when Lewis Hanke moved from Harvard to become the first Chief of the Hispanic Reading Room.  Publications alternate by year, focusing on the Humanities and Social Sciences, respectively.  Each group of theme-identified titles begins with a paragraph providing a literature (and often partly historiographical) review of that years' scholarly production.  Currently, the most recent print volume is available in Geisel's Reference Section.  Beginning with Vol. 75 (2023), annual installments are also available digitally through collaboration between the University of Texas and JSTOR.  Annotations of particular titles (indexed by subjects as well as authors) can be accessed through the HLAS online platform, but without the brief thematic essays contextualizing them.

Book Reviews and other kinds of Review Sources are also useful as they can help you:

1. Find out what others have said about a scholarly or creative work
2. Identify controversies about the work
3. Find out how the work relates to other works
4. Find out what's new in your field of interest
5. Easily identify recommended works for consultation

See the Review Sources Guide, which points to strategies and places to search for Book Reviews; Film Dance and Theater Reviews; and Research Literature.